I use the integrated 10/100 LAN from my mboard for the External LAN eth0 (thinking it is going to be a long time before my internet access speed is as high as 100 Mbit/sec) and then a PCI 1Gbit LAN card for the internal LAN eth1

The peak bandwidth of a PCI bus is 133MB/s or 266MB/s for 64 bit, both of which are ample for a Gbit interface, assuming you aren't flooding the PCI with massive amounts of other traffic at the same time.

The point I was trying to make was that for the internal LAN where you might want to stream multiple audio/video streams to multiple MD's will be better off with the 125 MB/s Gbit LAN rather than the 12.5MB/s 100bit LAN but the 100 bit LAN is adequate for most peoples internet gateway

The point I was trying to make was that for the internal LAN where you might want to stream multiple audio/video streams to multiple MD's will be better off with the 125 MB/s Gbit LAN rather than the 12.5MB/s 100bit LAN but the 100 bit LAN is adequate for most peoples internet gateway

OP - What you haven't mentioned.. Is this for the Core, a MD, or a Core/MD hybrid? If a Core or MD, are you planning to run just SD quality or are you building it to handle any HD res at all? I'm just assuming this includes media center stuff, not just the home automation parts.

In addition to suggestions of 1G+ memory, core duo 2 cpu, a second 1G nic if it's a core and you plan to have MDs, and nvidia 6200 video card you are going to need far more than 80G of storage if you plan to use this as your media center repository or no drive at all if it's just a MD. I didn't see any method of video capture, but with limited support for digital cable cards, analog cable going away by Feb. and not knowing what you have for TV it's hard to make a good recommendation. No DVD drive is fine if you plan to rip everything on some other computer, but it may be a bit difficult to install in the first place.

I also use the integrated 10/100 LAN from my mboard for the External LAN eth0 (thinking it is going to be a long time before my internet access speed is as high as 100 Mbit/sec) and then a PCI 1Gbit LAN card for the internal LAN eth1.

I also use the integrated 10/100 LAN from my mboard for the External LAN eth0 (thinking it is going to be a long time before my internet access speed is as high as 100 Mbit/sec) and then a PCI 1Gbit LAN card for the internal LAN eth1._________________offshore staffing solutions

We do the same on our systems too where the onboard is 10/100 - good point. We also avoid using any NIC that uses the forcedeth driver for the internally facing NIC (ie the LAN side of the Core) as we have had numerous problems when the using the forcedeth driver & nVidia onboard NIC's. in these situations we us the onboard as the WAN side and we have no problems at all.